


How We Work

by hops



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Post canon, Twins, self image talk, spoilers for ep 67, twin feelings?? etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 19:55:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11562228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: "It really doesn't matter, alright? Like, Lu, I love you, but I don't want to fucking talk about how I feel or whatever."She feels the whirl of dizziness that comes with his words. Who was this person sitting in her brother's place?Weeks after everything's over, Lup and Taako talk about the effects of their time apart.





	How We Work

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into post-canon. I left it ambiguous on purpose, although I put Lup back in a body. (Unless, liches paint their toenails?)  
> I don't think I fully finished this one but I just had to end it and let it go lol.

Weeks after it's all over, it's almost as if nothing ever happened. Almost.  

Lup is sitting on Taako's bed, humming quietly to herself as she paints her toenails with a pearlescent lilac that she found in Taako's vanity. She pauses now and again to look up at her brother, worry touching her eyes. He sits in front of the mirror, eyes slanted in concentration as he seemed to thoughtlessly braid and unbraid his hair, slowly tying a bow at the end each time. Lup could never recall a time that he'd ever been so quiet. Perhaps not since that night that she told him she and Barry were planning to become liches.  

That was the last time Taako had bottled an emotion up and away from her. At least, since she'd disappeared.  

But now... Now her twin, who she'd shared everything with, who intuitively knew her feelings, and she knew his, was far away. His focus constantly elsewhere, Taako was distant, quiet, sometimes quick to anger. He was foreign to her. Ten years apart had rocked them both to the core.  

She leans forward to paint a toe with ease. "Taako, dear?"  

There's a slight pause before he answers. "Lu?"  

She inhales. "What's going on?"  

"I'm doing my hair."  

"This is the fourth time you're braiding it that way," she says, screwing the brush into the polish bottle and setting it aside. With a quick wave, she casts a spell that instantly dries the polish. "Come on. Talk to me."  

"It's nothing," he says, almost  _pointed_ in his tone. The natural way it flows from him shocks her, the words ringing strange in her ears.  

It leaves her reeling for a moment. She is silent for a little while, trying to make sense of the person sitting across from her. She knew she'd changed in their decade apart: she'd grown more patient, perhaps wiser in her pace and temperament. But she hadn't accounted for the ways that Taako might have changed: that having his memories erased had led him to spend ten years believing he'd grown up in their desolate childhood (the one in which in reality, they had thrived in the company of the other,) completely alone, and that the failures that punctuated the rest of his adult life were symptoms of this loneliness.  

"I know you may have forgotten this for a little while, Taako, but I know you." Lup says cautiously, looking from her finished toes to the mirror and back again. "I know when you're keeping things from me. That's how we work."  

"It really doesn't matter, alright? Like, Lu, I love you, but I don't want to fucking talk about how I  _feel_ or whatever."  

She feels the whirl of dizziness that comes with his words. Who  _was_ this person sitting in her brother's place? "Can you at least look at me when you talk?"  

Taako turns around, still braiding his hair, saying nothing.  

"You’re using a spell right now. I can see it in your face. You're focused on something else." He flinches at the accusation. "Cut it out. Please, Taako, I want to talk about this and we can't if your focus is elsewhere."  

With a sigh that trembles in his throat, Taako turns to his side and puts a stop to the disguise self spell he’d been casting with a twitch of his hand. Lup watches as his appearances change in an instant to be just slightly different. No longer her mirror image. More like some version of him touched by time and loss and the weight of the world that maybe she’d been exempt from in some ways. She felt guilty. 

“Wonderland,” he says, looking down and away with a smile she knows is hiding watery tears. That’s why his bangs always fall to the front and to the right. Easy to cover the eyes. “They got me good, right?”  

He barks out a laugh. Foreign.  

"I don't understand," she says. "Just look up, Taako."  

He does, with some attitude. His smile is gone, replaced with a few mascara tears, his lips pressed into a hard line.  

"Fucking..." He curses under his breath, looking up at the ceiling. "Stupid. Stupid. God, it's so stupid, Lup. It was all so stupid, going there at all. We did what we had to do to save the world and shit but, and I know it's so  _stupid_ and selfish of me, I just lost what makes me... Taako. I don't know."  

It breaks her heart for the millionth time, hearing him talk like this. She'd heard him now and again in the staff, talking to Kravitz or Magnus about maybe an iceberg's tip of those feelings of inadequacy, but not even Lup sensed how deeply some of those concepts had manifested within him in the last decade. She opens her mouth to speak, but comes up empty and leaves a silence that Taako fills with a sob.  

The feeling ripples through her, just as that intuition had rippled through the umbrastaff and into the essence of her soul, and created some of the most powerful magic she could summon within her and channel through the staff to protect him. It feels foreign and familiar all the same.  

It pours from him all at once: “I don't even look like you anymore. I feel like I don't even _know you_ ," Taako cries. The gravity of those words shake her: her twin, her heart, feels like he doesn’t even know who she is. “I forgot you and there's a whole part of me that lived ten years believing I was always alone. And there's another part of me that lived a hundred years running from the apocalypse with my sister and having a fucking  _family_  and... and... I don't know. I don't know how to reconcile all that. And this--" he waves a hand around his face. He just looks so... normal. No fantastical makeup, no twinkling bat of the lashes, no perfect curl in his lip pulled up into a smile. Just Taako. "This is just making it so much worse, to not even recognize myself and to feel so... so..." He sighs in absolute defeat. Perhaps exhaustion from the words that just rushed from him. "Ugly."

She seats herself on the edge of the vanity and takes both his hands. "That is quite the fish to fry, dear. For starters, you’ve got about eight different things going on here.”  

Taako laughs, only mildly hysterical, and pulls one of his hands from hers to wipe his eyes. “Yeah, well. I haven’t had anywhere to put it down in ten years.”  

He wipes the mascara smudges on his lap and slips his hand back into Lup’s. Her ten years had been long, unbearably so at times, but she could at least meditate on the fact that hopefully somebody someday would get her out and back to her friends, to Barry, to her twin. Taako hadn't had any of that and, despite thinking that she’d given that proper consideration, upon reflection she finds that she really hadn’t. She watches in tearful silence as Taako examines her fingernails which she'd painted the same lilac before her toes.  

"The lilac is nice," he says, voice watery, and sniffs. "But you know I like magenta on you better."  

She laughs and squeezes his hands tight in hers. "I'll paint them a hundred times if it meant hanging out with you." She pauses and looks down at their hands, mirroring her brother. "I want to hear about everything I missed. And I mean  _everything,_ Taako."  

"We'll get there," Taako said quietly, still looking down.  

"No, Taako, I... I want you to know something. While I was stuck in the staff, I... well, I guess this is gonna sound strange, but I could feel what you felt; when you were scared, when you were angry, when you were happy-- I felt it, Taako. And every time you were hurting, I was screaming at the top of my lungs for you to just  _l_ _et me out_  just so I could light whoever was hurting you on fire. I was still with you, at least for that part... " She takes a trembling breath in, feeling a wave of a thousand different feelings ripple through her. She's overwhelmed, happy, grieving, angry, guilty, relieved, all at the same time. "I was gone for a long time, and some of that was my fault. But I promise you that I'm here now, okay? And I'm not going anywhere. And even if it really takes me sitting here on your bed and painting my nails every single day until we're back to normal, I'll do it. I'll do whatever it takes because you're my heart, Taako, and I love you."  

She watches as a few big tears fall to Taako's skirt, leaving dark pink prints where they melt away.  

When she speaks again, she's crying. "I'm so sorry, Taako."  

"Why are you sorry?" He cries and throws himself into his sister's arms. "I'm the one who's sorry. I'm just so glad you're home, Lup. I'm so fucking glad you're home."  

She holds onto him for an extra tight moment before pulling him away, a hand on either of his shoulders. She knows, intuitively, that she's not going to get more out of him for tonight, and that's okay. "Come on, then," she says with a smile. She reaches up to thumb away a glittering stray tear from Taako's cheek. "Let's go make something to eat. Cookie dough, maybe?"  

Taako smirks. "When I eat my feelings these days, I usually go for brownie batter, a little sea salt caramel action?"  

"Ooooh, now you're speaking my language," Lup laughs. "Race ya there."  

It's like they're kids again, for just a moment, jumping over furniture, racing down the hall, their laughter carrying through the long corridors and beyond. And for a moment, they're okay.  


End file.
